Algorand's testnet dispenser is now Lora's login-gated faucet

2026-08-18

faucet · testnet · algokit · developer-tools · discovery · web · updated

Algorand's testnet dispenser is now Lora's login-gated faucet

The old dispenser URL now opens a login page

For as long as most Algorand developers can remember, the first stop after generating a fresh wallet on TestNet — Algorand's experimental chain, where tokens have no real-world value and applications are tried before mainnet — has been bank.testnet.algorand.network, the 'Algorand dispenser' that has handed out test ALGO since at least 2019. Its standing notice for years: 'The dispensed Algos have no monetary value and should only be used to test applications.' Visit that URL today and the old paste-an-address-and-click form is gone. The domain now serves the Fund page of Lora, the browser-based explorer of the AlgoKit developer toolkit, and greets visitors with a different message: 'To help protect this network, we impose daily fund limits. Please log in to fund your account.'

The switch is recent. The Internet Archive's index shows the old dispenser page responding normally as late as January 17, 2026, and a redirect recorded from the domain on February 7, 2026 — putting the cutover within the past six months. The old page's warning read like a relic of a more trusting era; the new one announces that era's end: test ALGO now sits behind an identity.

Lora: the developer workbench that swallowed the faucet

Lora (Live On-chain Resource Analyzer) is the visual layer of AlgoKit, the Algorand Foundation's developer toolkit, introduced with the AlgoKit 3.0 release in March 2025. Reachable in the browser at lora.algokit.io or from a terminal with algokit explore, and fully open source on GitHub, the tool reads chain data directly from node and indexer services rather than a proprietary backend — the TestNet deployment was observed talking to Algonode's public testnet API. It is organized around four modules, each aimed at a different phase of the build-and-test loop:

Module	Concept	Real-World Implication
Explore	Inspect blocks, transactions, accounts, assets and applications, with a visual transaction view	Trace exactly what a transaction group does before sending it
App Lab	Deploy and call smart-contract apps from an uploaded ARC-4, ARC-32 or ARC-56 app spec	Exercise a contract without writing a deployment script
Txn Wizard	Craft and simulate transaction groups visually	Skip hand-serializing transactions or managing group ordering
Fund	Dispense test ALGO to accounts on TestNet and LocalNet	Get play-money ALGO inside the tool you are already working in

The Fund tab is the piece that now answers the old dispenser's job. Its network selector covers LocalNet — a private chain running entirely on a developer's own machine — plus FNet and BetaNet, two additional dev-focused networks used to trial protocol changes; MainNet is excluded, the page reading 'Funding is not available on this network.'

How a dispense works now

Opening the TestNet Fund page and clicking 'Log in' lands on an Auth0-hosted screen titled 'Log in to dispenser-prod to continue to AlgoKit lora,' asking for an email address and a verification code. The Algorand developer portal's own funding guide still describes the flow as a Google sign-in plus reCAPTCHA before entering the address to receive test ALGO; the production bundle contains no Google sign-in path, so the email-and-code screen is what developers actually meet. Once authenticated, the form takes a receiver address and an amount, enforces a 0.1 ALGO minimum, and shows how much of the account's remaining daily allowance is available.

The reason a faucet exists at all is a quirk of Algorand's ledger economics: every account must hold a minimum balance to be registered, so a freshly generated address with zero balance is unusable — it cannot even pay the fee on its own first transaction. The dispenser is the bootstrap that turns a keypair into a working account. It works by sending a payment transaction to the requested address, and it can be run in reverse: a developer who funded more than they need can send test ALGO back to the dispenser's wallet and call the refund endpoint with that transaction's ID — every submitted Algorand transaction is stamped with a unique ID, and the refund flow uses it to prove which dispensed payment is being returned. The API behind all of this is public and documented: POST /fund/{assetID} to dispense, GET /fund/{assetID}/limit to check the allowance, POST /refund to return unused funds, with limits resetting daily at midnight UTC.

The same service is wired into the AlgoKit CLI as the algokit dispenser command family (login, fund, refund, limit), and a CI token issued for 30 days can be stored in an environment variable so automated test suites top themselves up — the docs' ensureFundedFromTestNetDispenserApi helper checks an account's balance and refills it from the dispenser when it drops below a threshold. For developers who never touch TestNet, LocalNet funding is even simpler: Lora can create and fund accounts directly from the pre-funded dispenser that ships with the local chain, with no dispenser login required.

One organization controls the tap

Every layer of this stack is operated by the same entity: Lora lives in the algorandfoundation GitHub organization, the login screen names the 'dispenser-prod' tenant, and the dispenser API runs on api.dispenser.algorandfoundation.tools. The Algorand Foundation that funds AlgoKit is the Algorand Foundation that holds the test ALGO and decides who gets it — and the login gate it has added funnels every new TestNet developer through its own account system before they receive tokens with no monetary value.

That concentration carries three concrete tradeoffs. First, an email address is now collected as the price of entry to a faucet, and that identity is what the daily limits are attached to. Second, there is no second official faucet to fall back on: AlgoExplorer's testnet dispenser no longer resolves — its parent domain is gone — so if the Foundation's dispenser API degrades, the whole TestNet onboarding path narrows to a single operator. Third, while the web UI and its call flow are open source and inspectable in the Lora repository, the dispenser backend itself — the service that actually signs and sends the ALGO — is published only as an API contract, not as code, so the limits and any changes to them are enforced by a closed service.

The gate is not pure rent-seeking. The old dispenser was chronically farmed: a 2022 Reddit post described harvesting 4,300+ test ALGO in about an hour, and a 2022 forum thread complained the dispensers handed out only 10 ALGO per request — slow for anyone who needed roughly 1,000 to test smart contracts. Per-account daily limits tied to an identity are a direct answer to that abuse, and the allowance resets every day at midnight UTC rather than accumulating. The tradeoff for developers is that abuse prevention now has a name, an email address, and a single point of control attached to it — the classic bargain of centralized convenience on a permissionless chain.

Source

Source: https://bank.testnet.algorand.network/